From Wendell Berry's "A Continuous Harmony"

"If you aren't for us you're against us, somebody is always saying. That seems like a sad little pair of options, insofar as to any kind of intelligence the possibilities ought to be numerous, if not infinite. Intelligence consists in being for and against such things as political movements up to a point, which it is the task of the intelligence to define. In my judgement intelligence never goes whole hog for anything public, especially political movements. Across the whole range of politics now (and I suppose always) you find people willing to act on the assumption that there is some simple abstraction that will explain and solve the problems of the world, and who go direct from the discovery of the abstraction to the forming of an organization to promote it. In my opinion those people are all about equally dangerous, and I don't believe anything they say. What I hold out for is the possibility that a man can live decently without knowing all the answers, or believing that he does--can live decently even in the understanding that life is unspeakably complex and unspeakably subtle in its complexity. The decency, I think, would be in acting out of the awareness that personal acts of compassion, love, humility, honesty are better and more adequate responses to that complexity than any public abstraction or theory or organization. What is wrong with our cities--and I don't see how you can have a great civilization without great cities--may be that the mode of life in them has become almost inescapably organizational.

"It used to be that every time I heard of some public action somewhere to promote some cause I believe in, I would be full of guilt because I wasn't there. If they were marching in Washington to protest the war, and if I deplored the war, then how could my absence from Washington be anything but a sin? That was the organizational protestant conscience: In order to believe in my virtue I needed some organization to pat me on the head and tell me I was virtuous. But if I can't promote what I hope for in Port Royal, Ky., then why go to Washington to promote it?

"What succeeds in Port Royal succeeds in the world." (Wendell Berry, "A Continuous Harmony", 1972, pp. 49-50)